


The Price

by opalmatrix



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:16:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27178444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/pseuds/opalmatrix
Summary: As she recovers on the Emperor's flagship, Harrowhark's reading material takes a hand in providing what she needs most.  AU like whoa.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	The Price

**Author's Note:**

  * For [downjune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/gifts).



> Well, downjune, you set me quite a challenge: nothing from _Harrow the Ninth_ , even though I had just read it and had my head filled up with it! So I hope you enjoy this bit of AU. Beta by [Daegear](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daegaer/pseuds/Daegaer).

Harrowhark was sure the books were well-intended. It was not the fault of the anonymous donors that her lack of concentration made a mockery of the idea that a book could take her away from cold, colorless room that was currently her world. 

She'd woken from troubled, restless sleep to find the stack of volumes on the small bedside table, taking up most of its meager surface. An hour or more had passed before she felt any need to know what they were, beyond the obvious.

The book on starship engines was quickly discarded: even if she'd been interested, she couldn't make any sense of the unfamiliar terminology and abstract, intensely detailed drawings. Likewise discarded was the tawdry romance, _His Captain's Plaything_ , the first page of which nearly triggered another bout of nausea. The old volume on ghosts and revenants hit a little too close to her current situation, and the memoir of the Fourth House champion now two centuries gone nearly sent her back to sleep after five pages.

That left a book of folk tales and a volume of comics. The folk tales were from the ancient days of the first house, and Harrowhark found them weird and mostly nonsensical, but nevertheless a welcome distraction. She could not manage more than one or two tales at a session, but for those brief periods her mind was well occupied. She began to resent visits from the medics and from fellow convalescent Ianthe, who resented her in turn until Harrow thought of sending her off with the rejected romance.

One morning (for lack of a better term: Harrowhark had yet to make sense of the ship's timekeeping), she finished the last tale and lay back on her pillow, eying the comic book warily. It was Gideon who had liked comics. That was why Harrow confiscated them when she could, but after one or two attempts to read them, she had given up. Gideon's taste for scantily clad, buxom wenches in violent or romantic situations (and sometimes violent romantic situations) was not something she could stomach. But remembering that, she was touched anew by desolation: that same Gideon had gazed at Harrow with tender ardor in her hot golden eyes, unconcerned that her necromancer lacked more the slightest suggestion of feminine curves.

At last she pulled the book toward her. The stylized, elegant drawings on the cover were reassuring: this seemed quite unlike her cavalier's prurient adventure tales. She opened it and started to read. In the story, a youth discovered a strange shop where none had previously been. Its proprietress was a woman of mystical powers who granted her customers their desires when an appropriate price was paid. These prices were never money and only rarely goods; usually, they were intangibles such as memories. Quite often, the customers got more than they had requested; instead, they got what they deserved. Harrow began to wonder whether the "witch" who ran the shop was actually meant to be an early necromancer.

At last she turned a page to start what seemed to be the last chapter. The drawings showed a new customer entering the shop, a slender person in dark draperies or robes whose thin shoulders seemed to be bowed with age or other burdens. As she studied the illustration, Harrow's gut was suddenly uneasy. as though the starship had shifted unexpectedly somehow. She was not sure she wanted to see the customer's face.

She made herself turn the page. The next two pages, spread open, showed a single drawing. The shop owner's pitiless, stylized face, all huge eyes frame by long, dark twining hair, was looking straight into Harrowhark's own eyes. "What would you give for the life of Gideon Nav?" she said, in black letters printed on the white page, encircled by the tailed oval that indicated speech.

Harrow slammed the book shut and threw it on the floor. The slap of the cover on the clean tiles was echoed faintly from one of the side walls, which were nearly hidden by stacked plastic crates of medical supplies and bedding. Under Harrow's appalled and startled gaze, a shower of tiny metal particles was falling from the wall to the floor.

Her mouth was dry. She sat up and slid out of bed, bare feet cold on the hard tile, and picked up the book. She sat down on the edge of the bed and leafed slowly from front to back. Yes, what the new customer was wearing was like the day robes of a Ninth House nun, not identical to what Harrow had worn for most of her life, but very similar. The customer's hair was closely cropped and dark, like her own. And the two-page spread of the shop owner was still there. The several pages following it were blank, and then the volume finished with the half dozen pages of cultural notes she had noticed when she first examined the volume. But she didn't recall seeing any blank pages then.

_What would you give for the life of Gideon Nav?_

She remembered the prices paid by the other customers in the earlier chapters. "The strength and youth of my body," she whispered.

A spasm shook her and made her double up with pain, clutching the book in her lap. The pain spread throughout her body and diminished, but did not entirely leave. She felt stiff and sore, and the skin on her hands and the tops of her bare feet seemed thin, dry and papery. Purple veins stood out beneath the dull white-grey.

She set the book down carefully on the bed and rose to look in the mirror, her knees protesting as she stood. Her resemblance to her mother was inescapable, but her mother had not reached this age before death. Harrow's dark hair was thinning and mixed with white. Deep lines grooved her forehead and framed her mouth, and her eyes were sunk in her head. She reached up in a daze of horror to touch her face, and her fingertips only confirmed what she saw.

Another whisper of sound from the wall, and now the outline of a door was revealed. She stared at it with longing and dread, wondering whether what she'd bought with the price she'd paid was behind it.

A familiar chime rang out. Someone was at the actual door to the hallway.

Harrow froze, then rushed to turn out the light and fling herself in bed. Every joint and bone protested. She automatically reached out with her inner senses and recoiled: her bones were as old as her face appeared.

"Harrowhark?" It was Ianthe.

"What?" It took no effort at all to make her voice cracked and weary.

"I want another book."

Harrow reached to the bedside table, selected a book at random, and threw it toward the door. There was a silence, then the door opened just a bit. "That was rude."

"So are you. I was asleep."

Ianthe opened the door, stepped in, and picked up the book, awkward with the absence of her other arm for balance. " _A Gathering of Ghosts and Spirits_ ," she read from the cover. "Hmm. Sounds too useful to be entertaining. Sleep tight, _Harry_."

Harrowhark ignored this and screwed her eyes shut tight. After far too long and several exasperated sighs, Ianthe left, closing the door behind her.

Harrow counted to a hundred, then slowly sat up and stood once again. She turned on the bedside lamp and opened the comic book again. This time, the page after the double-page spread showed the customer's face: a stylized young woman's face. She was speaking: "I would give the strength and youth of my body." Then a cloud filled with dark swirls covered her, and in the last panel, her hands covered her face: veined and knobby hands. The rest of the pages were still blank.

Harrowhark shuddered, dropped the book on the rumpled bed, and went over to the newly revealed door. There was no knob, no handle, but as she ran her hands over the surface, there was a faint clunk, and the door panel slowly slid upward. The air that blew out was hot, moist, and smelled uncomfortably like flesh and blood. The space beyond was an irregular corridor, dimly lit and barely taller than she was.

As she stepped in, reluctant and uncertain of her newly aged body, disgusted by the soft, wet, warm floor, an amber light began flashing in the distance. She walked toward it, and from behind, heard a rush of displaced air. The door panel was closing. She tried to run for it and only ended up tripping on the uneven floor, landing on her knees in the yielding damp. The wall was likewise warm and moist when she pressed against it to stand, joints creaking and aching. Shuddering with revulsion, she turned back to the light and walked toward it.

Gradually, the light resolved into letters, glowing on a metal panel set into the wetly gleaming dark red ceiling: _What would you give for the life of Gideon Nav?_

"I have already given so much," she whispered.

The letters faded out, leaving her in near darkness. Then they flared on again, brighter.

Harrow gnawed her lip for a moment. Somehow, she was in the midst of a folktale as well as a comic. Then she said, "I will give the sight from my eyes."

Darkness, followed by a sense of space opening ahead of her, a rush of cooler air. Gritting her teeth, she reached out to one side until the encountered the warm, fetid wall. Slowly, stiffly, she shuffled onward. She considered creating a skeleton to help, but it would only see what she saw, which was nothing. After a short time, her toes encountered a hard edge. She stepped up onto a hard, drier surface. The wall that was guiding her abruptly ended, and she was reeling with no reference point. The floor ahead dropped suddenly: a step downward that was a mere matter of 10 centimeters, perhaps, but it was enough to make her fall headlong onto the hard stone.

She made no sound as her knees, elbows, and chin met the unforgiving surface but only lay half stunned. _How am I to do this? What am I doing?_ At last she took inventory of her bones again: nothing broken, for all the comfort that was. Blood was flowing from the lip she'd bitten unwitting, and she was reluctant to touch the wound with hands besmirched from the earlier fall into the slime of the corridor behind her. _When will someone notice I am missing from my room?_ But the thought was not the comfort it might have been. She would still need to explain her body's condition, her blindness.

And it didn't matter anyway; she would have given it all in vain.

Harrow dragged herself up to hands and knees, with breaths that were half-sobs, and crawled forward, feeling ahead in case there were another drop. Instead, she found an impediment after a few meters: a block of shaped stone. By degrees, she discovered it was perhaps a meter tall and twice that wide. She pulled herself up to stand beside it and felt on top: less than a meter across, flat, and smooth, and in the middle was a knife.

The hand grip was metal, and the blade seemed to be razor-sharp obsidian. It was chill against her skin. Harrow felt a matching chill growing in her gut, and she was startled but not surprised with a dry, flat, metallic voice spoke from somewhere above her head: "What would you give for the life of Gideon Nav?"

She leaned against the cold slab of stone, the cold stone blade in her hand, her stomach stone cold within her. There was only one way out of this, and it hardly mattered: either it would be enough, or she would be nothing. 

She braced her bleeding knees against the stone, arranged her wincing elbows on the flat top, the hilt of the knife clasped in both hands, the tip of its blade touching under her jaw, where the softness began. She had only to drop down onto it and the sharp, cold stone blade would part her skin and pass through meat and muscle until it entered her brain. _One life, one end._ She tweaked her elbow joints so they wouldn't relax too soon, drew a breath, and —

"Stop! Damn it, Nonagesimus!"

She was knocked sideways, the razor edge merely kissing the side of her jaw. The knife clattered on the stone tabletop. Strong, calloused hands squeezed her bare upper arms, warm and dry and gripping too tight. Light was visible through her closed eyelids.

"Harrow, talk!"

Harrowhark opened her eyes slowly. She was in a brightly lit room, white plastics, white tile, and steel. The tabletop was still granite, but its frame was metal. The knife was a wickedly sharp scalpel, and Gideon Nav was holding her up.

Harrow sighed, and her whole body relaxed. She felt no pain except where Nav was holding her and where her knees, elbows, and face had met the stone .... or tile?

Gideon's face was one wide, unintelligent grin, and Harrow searched her expression for any signs of dismay. After a moment, she found them: "Say something!" Gideon urged.

"You're alive," said Harrow. It was a stupid observation. She looked down at her own hands. They were thin and white, the hands of a young woman who had hardly ever been touched by sunlight. 

"And so are you," said her cavalier. She set Harrow down onto her own bare feet and pushed back her overgrown hair for a better look at her face. "You've been overdoing it again, right, my midnight nunlet?"

"You might say that," said Harrow.

Gideon look around. "Welp. Where the hell are we?"

"We're ... on the Emperor's flagship."

Gideon's amber eyes opened wide and she grabbed her necromancer's hands. "What are you even saying?"

"Griddle ... Gideon ... can we not talk about this? Just for a few minutes?" Harrow pulled her hands back and then cautiously twined her arms around Gideon. Her cavalier smelled like the Gideon she remembered, sweat and musty Ninth House finery and life.

"OK, OK." Gideon shrugged and then wrapped her strong arms around Harrow. She kissed the side of Harrow's jaw. "You're bleeding, sugarlips."

"None of that matters," said Harrow, her voice no more than a breath. "This is all I need right now."


End file.
